3. The Philosopher
But it would be foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is not dramatic technique but philosophical inquiry and political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlightenment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, and called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man, of women by men, and of all by the state. It is for these rebel souls that Euripides writes; for them he adds his skeptical innuendoes, and inserts a thousand heresies between the lines of supposedly religious plays. He covers his tracks with pious passages and patriotic odes; he presents a sacred myth so literally that its absurdity is manifest and yet his orthodoxy cannot be impeached; he gives the body of his plays over to doubt, but surrenders the first and last words to the gods. His subtlety and brilliance, like those of the French Encyclopedists, is due in some part to the compulsion laid upon him to speak his mind while saving his skin.
His theme is that of Lucretius—
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
—so great are the evils to which religion has led men: oracles that breed violence upon violence, myths that exalt immorality with divine example, and shed supernatural sanctions upon dishonesty, adultery, theft, human sacrifice, and war. He describes a soothsayer as “a man who speaks few truths but many lies”;99 he calls it “sheer folly” to chart the future from the entrails of birds;100 he denounces the whole apparatus of oracles and divination.101 Above all he resents the immoral implications of the legends:
Men shall know there is no God, no light
In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right. . . .
Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
Nor prisoner gods and gaolers: long ago
My heart hath named it vile, and shall not alter. . . .
These tales be false, false as those feastings wild
Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child.
This land of murderers to its gods hath given
Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven. . . .
All these
Are dead unhappy tales of minstrelsy.102
Sometimes such passages are softened with hymns to Dionysus, or psalms of pantheistic piety; but occasionally a character extends the Euripidean doubt to all the gods:
Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not, no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.103
He begins his lost Melanippe with a startling couplet—
O Zeus, if there be a Zeus,
For I know of him only by report—
whereupon the audience, we are told, rose to its feet in protest. And he concludes:
The gods, too, whom mortals deem so wise,
Are nothing clearer than some winged dream;
And all their ways, like man’s ways, but a stream
Of turmoil. He who cares to suffer least,
Not blind as fools are blinded by a priest,
Goes straight. . . to what death, those who know him know.104
The fortunes of men, he thinks, are the result of natural causes, or of aimless chance; they are not the work of intelligent supernatural beings.105 He suggests rational explanations of supposed miracles; Alcestis, for example, did not really die, but was sent off to burial while still alive; Heracles caught up with her before she had time to die.106 He does not clearly tell us what his belief is, perhaps because he feels that the evidence does not lend itself to clear belief; but his most characteristic expressions are those of the vague pantheism that was now replacing polytheism among the educated Greeks.
Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne
Above the World, whoe’er thou art, unknown
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be,
Or Reason of our Reason; God to thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod
To all that breathes and dies.107
Social justice is the minor theme of his songs; like all sympathetic spirits he longs for a time when the strong will be more chivalrous to the weak, and there will be an end to misery and strife.108 Even in the midst of war, with all its compulsion to a patriotic belligerency, he presents the woes and horrors of war with unsparing realism.
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.109
He gnaws his heart out at the sight of Athenians fighting Spartans for half a century, each enslaving the other, and both killing off their best; and he indites in a late play a touching apostrophe to peace:
O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring; there is no beauty like unto thine; no, not even among the blessed gods. My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not. Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly? Return, thou holy one, to our city; abide not far from us, thou that quencheth wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if thou art with us; madness and the edge of the sword shall flee from our doors.109a
Almost alone among the great writers of his time he dares to attack slavery; during the Peloponnesian War it became obvious that most slaves were such not by nature but by the accidents of life. He does not recognize any natural aristocracy; environment rather than heredity makes the man. The slaves in his dramas play important parts, and often speak his finest lines. With the imaginative sympathy of a poet he considers women. He knows the faults of the sex, and exposes them so realistically that Aristophanes was able to make him out a misogynist; but he did more than any other playwright of antiquity to present the case for women, and to support the dawning movement for their emancipation Some of his plays are almost modern, post-Ibsen studies in the problems of sex, even of sexual perversion.110 He describes men with realism, but women with gallantry; the terrible Medea gets more compassion from him than he accords to the heroic but unfaithful Jason. He is the first dramatist to make a play turn upon love; his famous ode to Eros in the lost Andromeda was mouthed by thousands of young Greeks:
O Love, our Lord, of gods and men the king,
Either teach not how beauteous beauty is,
Or help poor lovers, whom like clay thou moldest,
Through toil and labor to a happy end.111
Euripides is naturally a pessimist, for every romantic becomes a pessimist when reality impinges upon romance. “Life,” said Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”112 “Long ago,” says our poet,
I looked upon man’s days, and found a grey
Shadow. And this thing more I surely say
That those of all men who are counted wise,
Strong wits, devisers of great policies,
Do pay the bitterest toll. Since life began
Hath there in God’s eye stood one happy man?113
He wonders at the greed and cruelty of men, the resourcefulness of evil, and the obscene indiscriminateness of death. At the beginning of the Alcestis Death says, “Is it not my function to take the doomed?”—to which Apollo answers, “No; only to dispatch those who have ripened into full old age.” When death comes after life has been fully lived it is natural, and does not offend us. “We should not lament our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the passage of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature; and we must not be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.”114 His conclusion is stoicism: “Do thou endure as men must, chafing not.”115 Now and then, following Anaximenes and anticipating the Stoics, he consoles himself with the thought that the spirit of man is part of the divine Air or pneuma, and will, after death, be preserved in the Soul of the World.116
Who knows if that be life which we call death,
And life be dying?—save alone that men
Living bear grief, but when they yield their breath
They have no sorrow then, and grieve no more.117